


silver cement

by mnemememory



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Cute, F/F, I think I'm funny, sickeningly cute, watch as mneme fails at romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-21 09:28:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14912801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mnemememory/pseuds/mnemememory
Summary: “This isn’t funny.”Beau is on the ground, hands clutching at her stomach, laughing like she’s just had Nott put a spell on her. She shakes her head and manages to gasp out, “It really is”, before dissolving once more into incoherency. Yasha can feel her gaze flatten out, lips pulling back into an aggressive snarl.“Beau,” she says.(or; the one where Yasha is kidnapped by mole people and put into manacles, and that isn't even the story).





	silver cement

**silver cement**

...

...

“This isn’t funny.”

Beau is on the ground, hands clutching at her stomach, laughing like she’s just had Nott put a spell on her. She shakes her head and manages to gasp out, “It really is”, before dissolving once more into incoherency. Yasha can feel her gaze flatten out, lips pulling back into an aggressive snarl.

“Beau,” she says.

Beau grins up at her, bright and fierce. Any other time, Yasha would have been thrilled to have such a look directed her way, but at the moment she’s a bit – well, tied up. Being the subject for anything – though especially for amusement – has always been something of a spine-crawling experience, and this is only slightly more bearable than usual. The only thing that’s keeping Yasha in place and not curled up in a ball (with what was left of her dignity) was that Beau was the only one in the immediate vicinity. Yasha can hear the rest of them, rummaging around in the darkened background, but the cavern has a sharp twist about ten metres down that leaves her basically blind to the comings and goings of the group.

After a few minutes of Beau clearing her throat and gathering herself up, she straightens herself out enough to get to her feet. “Okay,” she says, snickering. “What happened to you?”

Yasha glowers at her.

Yasha’s hands are raised above her head, clad in two giant enchanted manacles that glow every time she strains against them. They haven’t burned her, which is a small blessing, so Yasha is free to exert all her fury against them for as long as it burns. Not an actual rage, which is disappointing on many levels, but it’s enough to work her down from any killing intent. Well, it had been, until Beau had come into the small cavern, taken one look at Yasha, and burst into laughter.

“Get me out of these,” she says, rattling the chains. Manacles. Why did it always have to be manacles? Yasha can go _months_ on her own without seeing any sort of restraint – she doesn’t run into law enforcement nearly as much as the Mighty Nein seem to think – and the moment she comes back onto their radar, bam. Manacles. They’re cursed, is what they are. Yasha doesn’t know how to feel about the fact that she’s obviously been contaminated.

“But you look so pretty,” Beau says, blinking up at her from beneath smudged eyeliner and a mask of dirt. There’s blood drying close to the side of her scalp, and she’s been smeared liberally with – something that Yasha doesn’t really want to think about, considering she probably doesn’t look much better. The walls are coated with some sort of oozing substance that makes Yasha’s toes curl uncomfortably and fingers clench. It drips down from where the chains are secured to the roof, and every so often she gets a nice fat chunk of it slapping down onto the back of her neck. She is…uncomfortable.

“Get me out of these,” Yasha says, and she doesn’t like sounding desperate, but damn if she isn’t. “Please,” she adds. She looks into Beau’s eyes and tries to figure out how best to get out of this situation before any of the others show up. Molly is going to be laughing at her, too, she can just feel it. The others won’t, because they’re too polite, but Molly will.

“Fine,” Beau says, drawing it out. But she’s still grinning, so Yasha can’t have annoyed her too badly. “I still think it’s a shame, though, what with you being so –”

Yasha’s eyes widen, and her cheeks go a very dark red. “Beau,” she says quickly.

Beau laughs again, coming over closer to where Yasha has been secured. There isn’t anyone else in the small alcove – well, not anyone alive. Some bones rattling in the corner, and a dead man stripped bare and half-covered in the ooze plastered to the far wall. Yasha’s been ignoring him, for the most part. She has every confidence that given a few more days, she could have gotten herself out.

“Fine, fine,” Beau says. “You’re going to have to lean down, though. I can’t reach that high.”

Yasha quickly debates with herself. “I can’t,” she finally says. “The chains aren’t long enough.”

That makes Beau frown, and she paces back to get a better look at where Yasha’s been placed. After a few seconds, she moves back over so she’s standing right in front of Yasha.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m going to need to climb you.”

Yasha stares at her. “Alright?”

“Stay still,” Beau says, leaning her staff against Yasha’s shoulder. “And don’t let that fall. I’ve already cleared off most of this muck. I don’t really want to do it again.”

“Alright,” Yasha repeats, this time a little more certain.

Beau grins, and then takes a running jump off of the wall and onto Yasha’s back. Yasha grunts at the unexpected weight, but manages to stabilise herself with the hanging manacles without too much effort. Her shoulder joints scream as she puts more weight on them, but after a few moments to re-establish her footing she’s loose enough that it’s negligible. It’s all background pain, anyway. It barely registers past the warmth of Beau as she scrambles further up onto Yasha’s shoulders, hooking on leg over so that she’s sitting with her stomach pressed up against the side of Yasha’s face.

“Hold…still…” Beau says, tongue poking out slightly as she reaches up to tug at the manacles.

Yasha squints upwards suspiciously. “Do you know how to unlock these?”

There is a long pause.

“Beau?”

“Give me a second here,” Beau says. She tugs at the chain, but Yasha’s been tugging at these chains since she was brought down here, and it hasn’t done a damn thing. “I’m trying to figure this out.”

“Beau,” Yasha sighs.

There’s another long pause, as Beau uses the chains to lift herself off of Yasha and scramble up. Yasha hisses as Beau’s foot clips her left hand, skin rubbed raw and chafing. The blood’s been sealed away by the dried goo, but Yasha has been trying very hard not to think about what’s gotten into her system in the process of this whole debacle. Maybe Jester will know. It’s almost comforting, in a sense, to know that the rest of her group of friends (can she call them friends? Do they consider her a friend?) is here. Jester will heal her without any questions – assuming she’s got any spells left, of course. Healing is such a different process when she’s on her own.

Beau’s managed to mess up the delicate weight balance system that Yasha’s been working on, so Yasha is now leaning painfully to the left. She tries to straighten her self with a flex of her shoulders, but her footing isn’t good enough for this. While there is considerably less slime on the ground than on the walls, it’s stills slippery enough to be a hindrance.

“Okay, so I think you’re stuck,” Beau finally says.

Yasha closes her eyes and hands her head down, just a little. She breathes in through her mouth and out through her nose. “Okay,” she says. “Do you want to go get Nott?”

“…I think I’m kind of stuck, as well.”

Yasha looks up. Beau’s managed to glue herself to the left chain, knuckles white and legs hooked as she hugs it close to her chest, inspecting the manacle from an angle.

Yasha considers this for a second. “Can’t you just jump down.”

Beau demonstrates her predicament by attempting to pull her hands off of the chain, only to rattle the chain. Yasha groans as pain shoots through her left shoulder.

“…no.”

“Okay,” Yasha says.

They stare at each other for a long minute, before some light breaks its way into the otherwise darkened alcove. “Beau?” Molly’s voice echoes through, light and amused. “Have you found anything?”

Beau works her way up to it, clearing her throat a number of times before shouting: “Yes!”

Yasha glares up at her.

“I might need a little bit of help, though,” Beau hastily adds. “Bring Nott!”

Molly pauses. “Is it a treasure chest?”

“I mean,” Beau starts, and then winces when Yasha rattles the chain she’s currently perched on. “No! Just get Nott! And hurry it up!”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Molly says. The light source comes closer. There are more footsteps than just Molly’s – from the light, Yasha has to assume that Caleb is with him as well. Yasha very briefly considers strangling herself with the manacle chains. “You don’t sound okay.”

“ _Get. Nott.”_

Molly rounds the corner, Caleb a few paces away. They both stop and stare at where Yasha is chained in the middle of the room, the ends of the chains bolted to the ceiling. She glowers sullenly at them, covered in some kind of pastel-grey gunk that looks like clay but feels like something a lot worse. She’s been here long enough that it’s streaked its way across her face and her hair and her clothing, leaving her with very few patches of exposed skin.

“Oh,” Molly says. Yasha’s eye twitches.

“Yasha,” Caleb says. He sounds more surprised than Molly, which is at least something. “I did not expect to see you here, Yasha.”

That’s when they both notice where Beau is.

Yasha doesn’t even blink, and she still misses it – one moment to the next, and Molly is sitting on the floor and laughing as hard as anything. From all the laughter that’s been going on here, Yasha’s surprised that the rest of the group hasn’t shown up to watch the show. She makes another tug at the manacles, and they burn blue. Beau yelps.

“Oh, Beauregard,” Caleb says, staring up at the both of them. “That’s where you are.”

Beau glares at them. “Nott. Now.”

“Oh, okay,” Caleb says, and then turns on his heel and walks away, his floating globules of light drawing after him. Yasha narrows her eyes, but the chuckle she catches is so faint, she may as well have imagined it.

“You can barely open a door, Beau,” Molly says, when he’s sufficiently recovered. Yasha has decided that she’s just not going to talk until someone asks her a question. It seems like the safest bet. “How did you think you were going to get her out of these?”

Beau grumbles something indistinguishable from the clanking of the chains, rattling them bad-temperedly. Finally, she says, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Now, I know your knight-in-shining-armour complex can sometimes be overwhelming –”

“ _Knight in shining armour_ ,” Beau squawks.

“Especially where Yasha is concerned,” Molly continues serenely, ignoring her outburst. “But really, this is a bit much, don’t you think?”

Beau gives him a nasty look. “Just get us down from here.”

Molly shakes his head. He doesn’t look much better than Beau – there’s less muck, but there’s also more blood, so it fairly evenly cancels the other out. His hair is perfect. Yasha kind of hates him for it. She can feel her own hair scratch stiffly against her back, sealed into a single, solid mass by the slime. She very, very badly wants a bath.

“Fancy seeing you here, Yasha,” he says, going back to ignoring Beau. “I must say, I’m a little startled. We haven’t seen much of you, these past few months. I was beginning to get a little worried. You are a _very_ wanted woman, after all.”

“I can stay out of trouble,” Yasha says.

Molly gives the manacles and chains a very judgemental look. Yasha does not appreciate his judgement. Not when she’s seen the kinds of things _he_ used to get up to in chains. Circus life was weird.

“See, for some reason, I don’t believe you,” Molly says. “Considering you were kidnapped by _actual mole people_.”

“Okay, okay,” Yasha says. “They are not _mole people_ –”

“They dug this place out themselves, they are _blind_ , they look like anthropomorphised _moles_ they are literally the embodiment of mole people, why are you even arguing this –”

“They were mole people,” Beau chimes in, because Beau is a traitor.

Yasha doesn’t know which way to glare, so she settles for tucking her chin in dourly and staring at the floor. Caleb sure is taking a long time. Yasha is very read to be _out of these manacles_.

“There was a gladiatorial ring a little further on,” Molly says, though he’s a little more hesitant in this than he was with his teasing. “Did they…?”

“They were working up to it,” Yasha says. She doesn’t look at either of them. As soon as she was out of these manacles, she’s leaving. It’s been decided. Yasha is leaving and not meeting up with this group for another three months. Make it a year. Maybe two, if she times things about right. “I, uh, kept snapping their necks with my legs anytime they came to get me.” It had been a miscalculation on their part, not chaining her up proper when they had the chance. None of the poisons they had tried seemed to last long enough – her body had metabolised them faster than anticipated.

“That’s kind of hot,” Beau says.

“Oh, dear lord,” Molly says, putting a hand to his temple to rub off an incoming headache.

This is how Yasha is going to die.

…

…

Nott comes. Eventually. Not soon enough, in anyone’s opinion, except maybe Nott’s.

She’s drunk, because of course she is. She scrambles up Yasha’s side easily enough, and Yasha is kind of tired of being used as an approximation of a rope ladder, but then Nott is poking around at her right manacle and it’s _gone,_ it snaps open, and Yasha’s arm collapses at her side like a dead thing.

“One down,” Nott says, stumbling her way to Yasha’s other shoulder. Yasha closes her eyes as the muscles pull unevenly, and then releases a long breath as Nott reaches up to the second manacle. Yasha is so close to being free. So close –

Something _snaps_.

“Uh-oh.”

“Nott, _what did you do_?”

…

…

They unstick Beau, and then set about chipping the chain out of the ceiling. Yasha drags it irately behind her as they make their way out from the underground and into the fresh air, the metal sparking off the ground.

Jester finds her sword with where all the other weapons are cached, and Yasha re-settles it against her aching bones, teeth locked against the pain. She slowly, deliberately walks out of the cave-system and then collapses face-first into the soft, soft grass.

“Yasha? Are you okay?” Jester says, kneeling next to Yasha and poking her in the forehead. Yasha groans, but doesn’t actually make any effort to move. As soon as she’s got her strength back, _then_ she’s leaving, she promises herself. Just a few…more minutes…

Warmth suffocates her, and she opens her eyes to see the end of Jester’s healing spell bouncing off her fingertips. Jester pats Yasha on the head. “It’s okay. You rest. We’ll camp here for tonight.”

Yasha doesn’t even bother to nod, just lets herself sink down, down, down. The manacle is still a throbbing weight on her left wrist, the chain digging into one of her knees, but she can’t be bothered to care. She just lies there, peacefully, and lets herself drift off to sleep for the first time in almost a week.

…

…

 Beau is tending to a fire, when Yasha comes to.

The rest of the Mighty Nein are all curled up inside a clearing. A full, fat moon casts the trees into black relief. Someone – or, rather, several someone’s, considering how big she is – has moved her, so she’s not lying down in front of a massive hole in the ground. Yasha appreciates that more than she thinks they realise.

“You’re awake,” Beau says, coming over to where Yasha is slowly gaining her bearings. Yasha sits back, spine stiff, shoulders twin knots of pain.

“How long?” she rasps out, throat thick and dry, but Beau seems to get the message clear enough. She hands off a skin of water, and Yasha tries to grab it, only to fumble. Beau grins and holds it up to Yasha’s mouth. After a few seconds of thought, Yasha starts drinking.

“You’ve been out for almost two days,” Beau says. “Jester was starting to get worried.”

Yasha sighs, then nudges the skin away with her nose. Beau takes it back and buckles it to her belt.

“Hey, you hungry?”

Yasha falls upon the food ravenously, tearing it apart with little care for etiquette. It’s no rat, but it’s warm and its thick and it tastes _nothing_ like slime, so she’s happier than she has been in a while. No, that’s a lie. Looking around, Yasha isn’t just happier because of the food. At the back of her mind, there’s still the half-formed plan to leave and just disappear, but there’s no thundering grown stabbing into her scalp, no gravelly urge to _Go._

“Thank you,” Yasha finally says, when she’s finished. “For finding me.”

“I’m glad we did,” Beau says. They stare at each other over the fire, light burning shadows across Beau’s cheekbones. Her eyes look very bright. “Who knows how long you could have stayed there. Molly wasn’t kidding, you know. He was getting worried.”

“I can handle myself,” Yasha says, and then waits. Sure enough:

“ _Mole people_ , Yasha, that’s not –”

Before Yasha can talk herself out of it, she leans forward to kiss Beau on the cheek. Beau cuts off and stares at her. Yasha sits back with a half-smile, fingers fidgeting against the remaining manacle.

“Thank you,” she repeats. “For finding me.”

Beau’s mouth opens and closes like a fish.

“Wait,” she says.

“I am tired. I think I’ll get some more sleep, now.”

“ _Wait_ ,” Beau says again. “Did you just – wait –”

“Goodnight, Beau,” Yasha says.

“ _Hold on a minute –”_

Yasha leans back against the tree and closes her eyes.

…

… 

 

**Author's Note:**

> OKAY SO LIKE you know how I said I was gonna update "running with knives"??? funny story...
> 
> (I was supposed to be working on ASSIGNMENTS goddamn. and then I accidentally watched episode 22 and they mentioned "manacles" *again* and like. I had to write this. I had no choice in the matter). 
> 
> Well anyway come say hi to me on tumblr, if you're in the mood to scream about these two nerds. 
> 
> (fair warning though I'm crazy awkward so like, keep that in mind, haha).


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